Online Brand Building Basics

What is a “Brand?”

Simply speaking, your brand is your identity, which consumers can equate with a particular product.  Your brand may be represented by its name, equated with its image, recognized for its slogan and differentiated by its unique qualities. According to the Center for Research in Brand Marketing at England’s Birmingham University, the average company estimates that its brand identity is worth about three quarters of its value. The value of a brand is known as brand equity.

Building Your Online Brand

Entire MBA courses, books and conferences address the theme of brand building, so we won’t describe all the models here. Suffice it to say that a few themes emerge from all the literature, speeches and opinions about building brand successfully:

• Brand recognition is both a rational and an emotional experience.
• Brand recognition can range from recalling a TV ad, identifying a logo or recognizing a musical jingle.
• Brand awareness isn’t enough to build a successful enterprise.
• Perceived quality is important. Quality isn’t enough.
• Your brand should conjure up positive associations in the minds of consumers.
• The desired outcome of brand building and brand recognition is ultimately brand loyalty. This has become more challenging than ever as the online marketplace appears to encourage consumer schizophrenia.

The Online Brand Building Advantage

The Internet provides many opportunities for building your brand that just aren’t available offline:

• The Reduced Cost of Publishing Information. Think about the costs of mailing thick catalogs, the cost of paper, and the expense of delivering flyers. The Internet lets you tout your products and publish photographs at a tiny fraction of the cost.
• Interactivity. You can show interest in your customers by asking for feedback, answering product questions and inviting them to return to your site. Your website can offer incentives, related products and advice without a reminder, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t show fatigue.
• A Consumer Research Tool. Consumers can and do use the internet for comparison shopping. If you ignore this capability, your business can sink fast. They have access to your competition, but you do too. Ignore them at your peril.
• No Time and Space Limitations. Your customers can visit your site at midnight in their pajamas. And they never get a busy signal. They can buy more than they can carry and they don’t have to have space for the baby in the shopping cart.
• Reduced Geographical Limitations. If you set up currency converters and overseas shipping, you can reach a broad audience all over the globe.
• The Competitive Advantage. You have access to all of your competitors’ information, just by looking. You can even check out their marketing strategies. Your advantage is that you can identify a niche and position your products as distinctive from the competition’s just by looking at what they already do.
• Responsiveness to Consumer Needs. This can be both an advantage and disadvantage. More than ever, you have access to market data, consumer responses you’ve gathered yourself and opportunities to fine tune and customize your products and services according to what your potential and actual customers tell you. A slow response time, though, can kill your brand.
• Strategic Partnerships. Have you noticed that Starbucks has more and more of its outlets inside bookstores and grocery stores? Online strategic partnerships are easier and less expensive to engineer. You can build your brand on the web site of a strategic partner who isn’t in competition with you.
• Online Communities. Shopping is a social experience. Your potential customers may well associate shopping on your site with a social visit too. Barnes and Noble did this well. Every book you buy is reviewed by professionals and any reader is welcome to come back and write his own review.

You can buy ads online, you can publish your domain name on business cards, you can drive traffic to your site with TV ads and you can optimize your site perfectly. What counts, though, is the positive consumer experience when they reach your site. All aspects of your site must be appealing, from arrival to checkout. If the Internet has made one thing quick and easy, it’s leaving the store.